Research

Chickenfoot

The process of programming has constantly been evolving to give users more and more feedback. It started with giving feedback at runtime, using a batch model and an interpretive model. With the batch model, a user would write code and compile it to obtain an executable. The shortcoming of this approach was that it had a long feedback loop. The interpretive model allowed the user to execute individual sections of code, obtaining instantaneous feedback, but not necessarily ending up with an executable. Since then, some programming environments (such as Eclipse) have moved feedback into compile time (as the users type code), giving users syntax highlighting and allow type errors to be caught quickly. These improvements of feedback given to the user help contribute to overall debugging facilities. This work seeks to further improve user feedback by creating a continuously executing environment, where the output of the program will be shown as the user types and navigates around the script. This takes advantage of the interpretive model, where the user can constantly see the code's output, and also results in a fully executable script. The benefit of this continuously executing environment is that it will provide a powerful debugging capability.